Raab discovered a long-lost autograph album, perhaps the largest assembled. Now Croatia is honoring its creator with statues and a forthcoming museum
In Oroslavje, a small town about 27 miles from Croatia’s capital, Zagreb, a plan is afoot to honor Joseph (Josip) Mikulec, a man who walked around the world collecting thousands of autographs of kings, presidents, and local townspeople. Oroslavje’s Mayor Viktor Šimunić is leading this effort to install a statue of Mikulec and to found a museum dedicated to him.
“This year we started the story,” Šimunić told us. They are planning to unveil the monument this month at a city-wide celebration.
Lost Mikulec Scrapbooks Found
Šimunić had initially reached out to The Raab Collection to discuss a remarkable autograph album created by Mikulec that Raab discovered and acquired. The 60-pound leatherbound scrapbook full of signatures, news clippings, seals, stamps, photos, and handwritten stories came to international attention through an article in Smithsonian magazine that described Mikulec’s fascinating journey around the world with his autograph collection in tow.
Mikulec, the son of Croatian farmers, was known in the early 20th century as the “Globe-Trotter” and appeared in hundreds of newspaper articles and two Pathé newsreels, in which he showed off the autographs of U.S. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, Calvin Coolidge, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as the Prince of Wales and the president of China, among others. Part autograph collection, part travelogue, the volume became a global time capsule.
After years of collecting, Mikulec sold this remarkable album to a prominent Philadelphian in 1924. He also sold another book with his own reminiscences. It was from the descendants of that person, nearly a century later, that Raab acquired the collection, which includes a second, slimmer volume, as well as correspondence between Mikulec and his patron.
Mikulec continued to travel–and to collect autographs–for at least another five years, but details about the last decade of his life are obscure. Based on photographs from the late 1920s, a missing, later third scrapbook was thought to exist. Last year, such a volume came to light in Croatia, still in the hands of Mikulec’s descendants and subject to export restrictions. It was purchased for the Croatian History Museum. This album was a later version of the original, depicted in movies and on the statue, now owned by Raab.
Mayor Šimunić reports that the staff of the Croatian History Museum is currently analyzing the book in their possession and creating a timeline for Mikulec’s journey “so that they can create the best possible story in the museum, and so that this story can be known worldwide.”
The ultimate hope, according to Šimunić, is to raise the necessary funding to reunite the scrapbooks in Zagreb and to make them the centerpiece of a museum exhibition about an extraordinary Croatian.
